I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit

Share

I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit

Following Wednesday's third presidential debate, an out-of-place poster with a large cartoon image of a grinning bee appeared on the wall of a room packed with spinmeisters brandishing Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs.

Most people who saw it on CNN that night probably didn't even notice it, but fans of a game called I Love Bees knew it was a shout out to them from a team of the game's players at Arizona State University, the site of that evening's debate.

I Love Bees is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of the growing genre known as alternate-reality games. In it, widely dispersed players coordinate to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions.

When all the answers have been supplied, the latest episode in an internet-based War of the Worlds-esque radio serial is unlocked and made available to its rabid fans.

"I think it's a new form of interactive entertainment that is still in its infancy," Steve Peters, who runs ARGN, the leading clearinghouse for information and discussion about alternate-reality games, said of I Love Bees. "It's a new way of storytelling. We've had novels and movies, and these things kind of blur the lines of fiction and in some ways invade the real world."

For those who obsessively play I Love Bees, the point is to take part in the creation and distribution of the radio drama. To do so, players log onto the game's website each week to find the latest clues and a list of the pay phones that will be called."

The site lists the GPS coordinates for each phone and the time it will be called. More than a million unique visitors have come to the I Love Bees website, the game's designers said.

Six main characters from the year 2552 prepare for a great war in the storyline. Each time a player correctly answers a pay-phone question, he or she is treated to 30 seconds of new material. Over the course of the game, the plot unfolds, revealing a menacing alien army that threatens 26th-century Earth and only intervention from the past can help.

The most exciting element of the game for some players is the possibility that they will get one of the rare live calls in which the drama's actors talk to whoever answers the phone and then incorporate the conversation into the show itself.

"It was very odd and very cool," said a San Francisco player named Lenore, known among the game's players as hmrpita. "Because you've been getting recordings all this time, and it was quite different to speak with a voice actor. She was pretty good. I got really into it, probably too into it. I felt like the characters were real."

One of the consistent elements of alternate-reality games is the so-called curtain that maintains players' suspension of disbelief, even as they take part in futuristic dramas. The first alternate-reality game was a multimedia creation called Beast in which players entered the world of Steven Spielberg's film AI in 2001.

Since the advent of that game, the genre has grown to the point that often four or five games might run at any one time. In each case, the games' designers take players on a journey that usually requires web-based sleuthing, coordination with others in faraway places and the willingness to do weird things in public.

"We're going all out on this," said Preston Thorne, an I Love Bees player from Boise, Idaho, who goes by the in-game name Lt. Weephun. "On the last one, we needed 250 people. We were short. We weren't getting anywhere near that. So we headed out to the mall, found a pay phone and got (strangers) to stand around and salute (for photos). Here in Boise, we got 60-plus people to stand around the pay phone and salute."

It's interactivity like that that makes endless 20-hour days worthwhile to I Love Bees' designers, who insisted on anonymity.

"The thing that makes this form of art interesting and unique is that it depends upon a collective audience," said one of the designers, who called himself Puppetmaster 2. "It evokes a shared community who talk together and puzzle together and try to figure out what's going on, and become immersed in the world and the story.... This experience goes on for three months. It's pervasively in your life, so the suspension of disbelief is a bubble that extends out in the rest of your life and the rest of the community."

To Thorne, who became notorious to many of the game's players for figuring out where the Sleeping Princess, one of the characters, was hiding and then turning her in, keeping the curtain in place is crucial.

"The instant I went from Preston Thorne, trying to play a game and answering a bunch of telephones, to Lt. Weephun, crew member of the Apocalypso helping Melissa complete her mission, it was a huge epiphany, and it made the game a lot more fun," he said. "And if we had any direct communication with the Puppetmasters, it would be less fun."

Meanwhile, most I Love Bees players are aware that the game is not an entirely freestanding venture. It is actually a marketing vehicle for the forthcoming video game Halo 2. Indeed, the I Love Bees storyline leads directly into that of Halo 2. The first promotion of I Love Bees was at the end of the trailer for the futuristic shooter game Halo 2, which was shown in movie theaters.

But that doesn't seem to bother most people involved with I Love Bees.

"It's like reading a good serial novel – you're left with cliffhangers," said Peters. "You kind of lose the fact that it's a big marketing campaign because it's so well done and very gratifying in and of itself. Whether you go out and buy Halo 2, you're going to have a great time."

A call to Microsoft, whose Bungie game studio is producing Halo 2, was not returned.

I Love Bees' lead designers said they were hired by Microsoft to make the game as part of the overall marketing push for Halo 2. But they, too, argue that I Love Bees stands entirely on its own.

"We're building a very different part of that world," said Puppetmaster 2. "In some cases, we're trying to recreate Casablanca with six main characters living their lives in the shadow of the events that are bearing down on them."

Regardless, as a serial, I Love Bees will eventually come to an end. And, not coincidentally, the final episode of the show is timed for the same day as the much-hyped release of Halo 2.

"Basically, the story is just going to lead into going and picking up your copy of Halo 2 and playing the game," said Thorne.

In any case, the phones keep ringing all across the United States, and they are even beginning to ring in Holland and England. Some people have driven hours to take part, and one player even braved Florida's Hurricane Ivan to answer a call at a pay phone that was destroyed shortly afterward.